The retail food industry, particularly those organizations providing convenience or fast food to the consumer, continue to call upon meat processing entities to produce products having a variety of controlled shapes. Each product should exhibit a specified shape in support of improved marketability to the public. Additionally, the product supplied should be uniform in terms of such shape as well as in weight to facilitate its efficient cooking. These geometric criteria also are referred to as “template requirements.” Such requirements attend to the esthetic appearance of the meat product on the plate or support upon which it is placed. Production formation of the products also should avoid undesirable meat components such as zones normally exhibiting an excessive fat content.
While variety of meat products have been contemplated or have been purchased with such specialized processing, over the somewhat recent past, substantial interest has occurred in connection with the breast portion of poultry. This interest has been the result largely of consumer demand attributed to the recommendations of medical groups that red meat should be substituted with poultry or fish having a relatively lower percentage of saturated fat. Initial breast of poultry products were of cutlet size either plated by restaurants or finding their way between sandwich bun halves. Less valuable trim from these cutlets typically has been ground and fashioned of formed, nugget-like products.
A variety of mechanisms were developed for carrying out the task of apportioning poultry breast into cutlets. For the most part they unreliably cut meat portion margins and failed to accommodate for the inherent orientation memory of muscle fibers. The former separation defect required hand trimming to achieve an acceptable profile, while the latter defect resulted in uneven cooking attributes.
In 1995, Smith introduced a controlled volume poultry breast apportioner which exhibited the advantages of carrying out very reliable separation and which functioned to accurately overcome orientation memory to achieve both uniform thickness from portion-to-portion and contribute to improved cooking attributes. Described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,569,070, issued Oct. 29, 1996, the apportioner employs a blade containing an upper cutting head die wherein the blade is combined with a rearwardly disposed compression surface. This upper die cooperates with a sequence of platens each of which incorporates a boundary slot for receiving the die blade and an associated bearing surface configured to engage the compression surface. This combination achieves highly reliable severing. The apparatus further incorporates a thickness defining compression component which both reduces orientation memory and controls the shape of the resultant meat product. The Smith device efficiently prepares poultry breast cutlets from breast having weights ranging from about 7 ounces to about 28 ounces.
More recently, chicken producers in the United States have been called upon to grow larger birds which, in turn, provide larger breasts ranging in weight from about 16 to about 24 ounces. To accommodate for these larger sizes, some producers have “horizontally” severed the breast in half prior to submitting them to apportioning systems. When so severed in half, the thinner tapering rearward region of the breast is unavailable for forming primary cutlets, the weight-based value of which is comparatively higher. Correspondingly, a substantial portion of the original breast is consigned to less profitable forms of meat which, as noted above are ground.
In 2002, Smith developed a method for apportioning these larger poultry breasts which provides a substantially improved yield of higher quality products intended for plate or bun utilization. Employing an adaptation of the earlier Smith apportioning apparatus, the method utilizes dual conformance paddle assemblies having compression surfaces. One such assembly is used to form with a platen mounted forward containment wall, a forward breast portion of uniform thickness t1. A second such conformance paddle assembly is utilized in conjunction with a platen mounted rearward containment wall to form a rearward compressed breast portion of uniform thickness, t2 which is selected to be about one half the thickness, t1. A die assembly then is utilized to complete the product peripheral definition with a trimming action. Then, the peripherally defined, uniformly thick forward portion is severed “horizontally” to derive two or more quality meat products. Typically, each of these forward products will exhibit a thickness, t1/t2.
Retail food marketing entities now have turned their attention to more elaborate poultry breast configurations. For instance, chicken tenders have found popularity. However, the availability of these tenders from meat processor sources is quite limited. Thus, a call has been made for tender-like cuts of poultry breast meat. Marketing entities have also looked to other shapes of unground breast products such as having a generally rectangular shape. For all such shapes, purchasers have specified that the resultant breast meat product may not contain high fat content peripherally disposed rib meat.
Heretofore, the finger-like tender emulating shapes have been produced by resort to quite expensive and somewhat labor intensive water jet cutting systems. These systems evolve inherently lower yield do, inter alia, to the loss of meat representing a saw-like “kerf” as a part is defined. Further, there is little, if any, three dimensional stabilization over the meat product during its formation to provide control over voids. Accordingly, new systems and attendant machinery are called for which exhibit a necessary flexibility for accurately forming a variety of three dimensionally stable meat product shapes while remaining cost effective.